Suez Canal targeted as war in Sinai spreads

The eccentric but dangerous war in the Sinai Peninsula is spilling over into
the rest of Egypt, with ships targeted in the Suez Canal

The puff of smoke as the rocket hits the ship is unmistakable. The muttered invocation of "Allahu akbar" on the video soundtrack declares the attacker's ideology. What the strike will mean for the Suez Canal, the world's most militarily sensitive stretch of water, is not so easy to judge.

The Sinai Peninsula is the scene of a murderous, often eccentric, but dangerous war that is spilling over its boundaries – marked, on the western side, by the Canal. Besides Egypt itself, Israel, America and world's leaders are anxiously watching its apparently irresistible spread.

Israel was already rapidly adjusting its security policies in the region, and that was before the escalation in hostilities triggered by the overthrow of the Islamist Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, in the summer. Since then there have been bombings and shootings not only in Sinai but in Cairo, the Nile Delta – and on the Canal itself.

The attack on the Cosco Asia, a giant container ship heading north from the Far East to Europe with 10,000 container loads of goods, was just the most dramatic example, filmed and posted online by the jihadis themselves.

"What if it had been a liquid natural gas tanker?" one senior Canal official asked The Sunday Telegraph, saying he kept the clip on his mobile phone as a reminder of what he was up against.

In a trip across the region, The Telegraph witnessed houses and villages being pulverised by tank strikes guided by helicopters, interviewed the relatives of those killed by both jihadi terrorists and the army's often broad-brush attempts to hit back, and were given the first full account of the attack in August on the Cosco Asia.

The rocket-propelled grenades were at first reported to have done no or little damage. The anonymous briefing however, the first by a senior official, gave a fuller picture. One of the two missiles did indeed bounce off a strut holding the containers, causing not much more than a few dents (and exposing, it turned out, a large load of counterfeit cigarettes, subsequently tracked and seized when they were unloaded in Ireland).

The other, however, holed the ship in the ballast tanks. It was above the water line and in any case ships of this size are built to withstand such incidents, but the potential for a more cataclysmic result was evident. Fuel tankers carry some three million barrels of oil along the canal each day.

Even after the troubles caused by the Arab Spring across the region, three or four cruise ships also plough their way through the canal between the Gulf and the Mediterranean every week, their passengers sunning themselves on deck perhaps unaware of what is going on nearby.

Still from a Youtube video uploaded by the jihadis showing them firing RPGs at the Cosco Asia on the Suez canal

The incident led to a major review of security, the official said.

They worked out that the jihadists had fired at the ship from a point 18 miles south of Port Said where undergrowth divided the road from the canal and access, even in daylight, could pass unobserved. The Canal-side lane of the road has now been closed to traffic there and security stepped up.

"We have the capacity, though obviously it was not enough otherwise this would not have happened," the official said. "But the army put a new plan into place the same day."

He admitted, though, that 100 per cent security was impossible. A more proactive policy against the insurgency in the meantime saw a new army offensive ordered just a week later on the militants' hide-outs by Gen Abdulfattah al-Sisi, Egypt's defence minister and new strongman.

The night that The Sunday Telegraph spent in the Sinai village of el-Mehediya was not untypical, according to villagers and the evidence of bombed-out buildings littering the countryside. At 5.30am, the entire village was roused by the sound of helicopters and tanks, as the army moved in for another of its punitive raids.

The day before, a jihadi gang had ambushed an army convoy on the road between the north Sinai border town of Rafah and the main city, Arish.

Setting off three explosions and raking two buses with gunfire, they had killed a soldier and a civilian driver.

Revenge was swift. Within four hours of the army's arrival in el-Mehediya, half a dozen houses lay smoking wrecks, hit by tank missiles or blown up with TNT, and across the whole district 72 arrests had been made. One soldier was killed, the army said, in a central Sinai village.

One of the house destroyed by the army

The army's tactics are not designed to win favour locally, and some residents who do not support the jihadis fear the policy will only encourage more young men to join their ranks.

"Everyone is angry," said Khaled Ayad, the house of whose uncle was destroyed in one part of operation, targeting those living near the scene of the attack.

His own family house had previously been destroyed in yet another operation, this time to clear away a buffer zone between the Egyptian and Gaza sides of the Rafah border.

"They made them leave the house, filled it with TNT and then exploded it. My uncle was not a terrorist. We even went and found the beer bottles in the basement," he said. "Everyone is now praying full-time against Sisi, because it is all so unjust."

The Sinai is often described as having become "increasingly lawless" since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The

truth is more complex.

Under the Camp David accords under which Israel returned the peninsula to Egypt, the army was not allowed into the border areas. But in Egypt, the army are the most important guarantee of security, and in an otherwise impoverished area, a semi-independent culture grew up in

the northern Sinai, which is not close enough to the beaches on the southern coast around Sharm el-Sheikh to benefit from that development.

Many of the houses now lying in ruins were suspiciously large to be those of the "farmers" their occupants say they were. Others openly

admitted to having made their money from smuggling goods, petrol and often weapons into Gaza. Yet more engage in an even less proud trade – people smuggling into Israel, often with extortion an extra part of the fundraising.

"I don't worry about the demolished houses," said one village elder, who is related to some of the leading members of Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, the leading local jihadist group, but has little sympathy for them.

"More than half of the houses destroyed – they may not have been terrorists, but they were people traffickers, so they don't deserve their houses anyway."

The elder asked not to be named. There is a strong fear of reprisals from the militants, many of whom are related to the major clans of the area.

One man who was prepared to go on the record was Walid el-Menaie, whose father, Khalaf, and brother, Mohammed, were shot by militants for trying to persuade other clan leaders to help the army against them. "He wanted them to persuade those related to the takfiri (radical) ideology to go back to the old customs and traditions, or to leave the region," he said. Instead, the two men were ambushed in their car while coming back from the meeting they had organised and killed.

Well over 100 soldiers have been shot dead or blown up since the start of the insurgency, and scores of militants in return. As for civilians, according to one count – by a tribal leader, whose house was also demolished, the day after he spoke to Al-Jazeera on the subject – 52 have been killed since June, including nine women and children.

Some of these deaths the army have acknowledged – they apologised after a 24-year-old man, Hussein Ali, and a 13-year-old boy, Hassan

Hussein, were killed in crossfire after jihadists opened fire on an army checkpoint a month ago.

"I was in the shop when there was a hail of gunfire," said Zuheir Ali, cousin of Hussein Ali, who was with a group of young men. "When I stepped outside his body was on the ground.

"The boy was calling the guys inside the shop, screaming 'Hussein's been killed, Hussein's been killed'. But then he got a bullet in his thigh." He died the next day.

Despite the criticism of the army, there is evidence that it may be having some success – at least, within its own limited objective of challenging the jihadists and the network of smugglers from which they come. David Barnett, who tracks the insurgency for the American security think-tank Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, says the number of reported jihadi attacks in the Sinai has fallen rom 104 in July to 29 in October.

However, that number may have levelled out, with a number of lethal attacks in the last week, and Ansar Bait al-Maqdis has in any case threatened to expand the war beyond its geographical base. In September, a car bomb set off by a recruit, a disillusioned former army officer, came close to killing the interior minister in Cairo.

Last month, in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya, another bomb struck the military intelligence barracks.

"We could just be seeing an alteration in tactics," Mr Barnett said. There have already been drive-by shootings in the capital and in the Nile Delta."

The spread of the Sinai insurgency to the mainland on a more regular basis is something we should be taking very seriously," he added.

Earlier this month, the "suicide video" of the interior minister's would-be assassin was released by the militants. Sitting in the car he has packed with explosives, he makes specific reference to the bombing campaign on Sinai, and accuses the army of waging war on religion.

He threatens the movement will now come after the authorities – and those who come too close to them. "Why are we afraid to declare the judgment of Allah?" he asks rhetorically. "Whatever your forts and guards, they will not protect you." The authorities – on the Suez Canal and across the country – are hoping differently.